Discover. Display. Protect.

RootsTech, Day 3.0

This morning’s keynote was from Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. His topic was “Personal Archiving and Primary Documents.” He talked about many projects of which I was unaware, including the fact that they had digitized all available years of the census (they are not indexed, but other services have done that…).

Openlibrary.org was another initiative I was surprised to learn about. The site is trying to create a web page for every book that gets you as close to a copy of the book as possible.

There also is an effort to create a television archive. All told, there are more than 300,000 moving images.

Take-aways:
“Hackers of today are the archivists of the next generation.” (This started a discussion on Twitter about how the BBC was indebted to hackers who helped restore videos that had been considered lost.)

“It’s a really bad idea to trust a commercial company with your only backup.” His advice was to have more than one back-up copy and send one (at least) to someone who is as far away as you can.